The Internet has become the dominant vehicle for data communications. The Internet is a vast collection of computing resources, interconnected as a network from sites around the world. And with the growth of Internet usage has come a corresponding growth in the usage of Internet devices, wireless devices and services.
The growing base of Internet users has become accustomed to readily accessing Internet-based services such e-mail, calendar or content at any time from any location. These services, however, have traditionally been accessible primarily through stationary PCs. However, demand is now building for easy access to these and other communication services for mobile devices.
As the demand for mobile and wireless devices increases, enterprises must rollout new communication capabilities beyond the reach of traditional wired devices, by extending the enterprise with extra-net applications, etc., to effectively and efficiently connect mobile employees with their home base. As the number of digital subscribers grows, traditional wireless providers must find applications suitable to the needs of these new mobile users.
However, service providers are not the only ones seeking applications to meet the growing service needs of wireless users. Traditional portal developers are also extending their traditional PC browser desk-top services to these new wireless markets.
With the growth of the wireless market comes a corresponding growth in wireless business opportunities, which in today's ever-growing markets means, there is a plethora of services available to customers of the enterprises that use these services. Many wireless service providers are now looking to add to basic core services by extending services such as e-mail, short messaging service notification, and other links to Internet Protocol (IP) based applications to drive additional business and revenues.
As the wireless market grows and Internet access becomes more mainstream and begins to move to new devices, wireless service providers are looking to develop highly leveraged Internet Protocol based applications on top of existing network infrastructure. To meet the growing demand for wireless client devices, enterprises need to provide access to any type of service from any type of device from anywhere and to provide content suitable for these devices without incurring substantial cost overhead.
The growth in wireless devices also means that traditional computer users who used to be tied to their desktop computers may now be mobile and would require remote access to network applications and services such as email. The mobility of wireless users presents a host of challenges to service providers who may have to provide traditional service to these new wireless devices. One such service is provided by Sun Microsystems, Inc., through its iPlanet™ platform to enable service providers to grow their services from basic traditional services such as voice to leading edge wireless applications with carrier-grade reliability and performance.
In addition to the traditional network applications that these new wireless users seek, the growth of the Internet and the introduction of new Internet enabled wireless devices have led to the explosive use of community-based web sites or portals. This growth in portals has created a need for wireless environments to provide portal support to handle the collection of data that relate to different topics such as news, stock quotes, applications and services required by wireless device users.
FIG. 1 depicts a prior art wireless client dependent based environment solution to handle similarly configured wireless client and provide the applications or portals required by these clients. The environment depicted in FIG. 1 includes wireless devices such as a Wireless Applications Protocol (WAP) phone 101, a wireless PC 102, a refrigerator 103, etc. In general, the wireless environment depicted in FIG. 1 is categorized into the network (Internet 104), Clients (e.g. mobile phone 101, PCs 102 and household appliances 103) and resources (e.g., web-sites 105, portals 106 and other applications 107).
For most of the wireless clients connected to the Internet 104, portals 106 offer the client the starting point of experiencing the Internet 104. Portals 106 are typically community-based web-sites that securely hold a collection of data related to different topics, including such applications as news, stock quotes, etc. For example, a wireless client connecting to the Internet will first login to a web portal site (e.g., yahoo) and from there browse through various sites to search for a host of different services.
The portals typically reside in a portal server which bundles an aggregation of services provided by an Internet service provider and provides these bundled services to wireless clients. A wireless portal server such as that developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. provides such portal access to wireless application resources residing on resource servers A 108, B 109 and C 110.
The prior art wireless server depicted in FIG. 1 primarily supports the two major types of browsers known by most Internet users. These include the Microsoft Internet Browser and the Netscape Communicator Browser. These browsers are both HyperText Markup Language (HTML) based and suitable for some wireless devices, especially devices with large display screens.
Today, hundreds of software applications are being written for use on the Internet. And as computer programmers rush to provide software applications for use on the Internet, often in newly-developed programming languages written for the specific needs of the Internet, programmers also have to find a way to deliver content suitable to fit small wireless devices.
In the prior art system such as that depicted in FIG. 1, a wireless device user uses the Internet browser to make search requests and to see the search results of data accessed on the Internet. After the user has created a search request using the browser, a message is sent out to the Internet to carry out the request. The target of the request message is typically one of the interconnected computers in the Internet network. That computer will receive the message, attempt to find the data satisfying the user's request, format that data for display with the user's browser and return the formatted information to the browser software running on the user's device.
The data that is transferred between the target computer and the user's device is typically formatted using HTML. HTML is a standardized notation to display text and graphics in a computer display screen, as well as providing more complex information presentation such as animated video, sound, etc. In the prior art system depicted in FIG. 1, the browser expects incoming responses from search requests to the Internet to be in HTML format. Thus, the target server generates its response in this format. This creates a problem for programmers since any changes made to the HTML notation will require a similar change at the server level to support such changes.
To resolve such code change dependency, prior art system developers provided a solution depicted in FIG. 2. In the prior art system, client requests sent to server 210 via the Internet are formatted using HTML. The received requests are then formatted using a different formatting language such as XML for presentation to the client. XML is a standardized formatting language created for standardized document interchange on the Internet. XML is widely accepted in the Industry.
The process for formatting the HTML parsed data uses a style sheet in generating the requested data for the client computer 200. In the prior art system depicted in FIG. 2, an extensible style language (XSL) is used in formatting the data accessed from Databases on server 220 as an input stream to server 210. An XSL style sheet describes how XML information is to be presented as HTML. Using these two inputs, server 210 creates an HTML data stream to be sent back to the client computer 200.
The prior art solution depicted in FIG. 2 thus allows the wireless server to use HTML formatting of the client computer s request to server 210 and XML formatting of the response data transmitted to the client computer 200. Although the prior art solution handles the issue of having to update the server 210 code each time the HTML code is updated, the prior art request retrieval formatting and presentation formatting lack the ability to use other markup languages.
With the proliferation of different types and models of wireless devices that use a host of micro-browsers not programmed in HTML, the prior art solution of FIG. 2 fails to provide suitable data retrieval and presentation formatting to meet the display characteristics of these different types of devices.
A further drawback of the prior art is that since content request and delivery is always assumed to be from and to an HTML based system, content formatting and presentation lack the flexibility of customization and the unique identification and association of content to a particular wireless client. For example, a particular client (in a class of wireless devices with display characteristics different from other clients in the class) is unable to have data formatted to suit the unique display characteristics of the particular client. This is because the prior art uses the least common characteristics of the class to format data as representative of the class.
As the number of models of wireless clients increases, having restricted content and very limited information about client characteristics impairs the ability of service providers to take advantage of new wireless technologies and provide efficient and cost effective services. This also impairs the ability of the wireless client to enjoy the full richness and look and feel of user interfaces provided by the server.